Conditions

We Are a Nationwide Leader in Disability Insurance Law

For the past two dozen years, we have seen all of the issues and the evolution of the disability insurance industry, including from the claim handling side. And we have taken depositions of claim handling an appeal personnel, as well as doctors in our ERISA cases that we have litigated nationwide. Thus, we have keen insights into their thinking and utilize this knowledge for our clients’ benefit when strategizing our claims.

What we have learned through these years is that the focus is on one’s impairments and inability to perform their occupational duties, more so than upon the name of their condition. When insurance companies focus upon the condition by diagnosis or name only, we remind them of their obligation to consider the insured‘s ability to perform occupational duties, rather than carrying a diagnosis.

Thus, it is not the diagnosis that makes someone disabled, but, rather, the functional limitations that result from medical conditions which serve to support one’s claim for disability insurance benefits. At Newfield Law Group, we properly advocate the claimant’s functional limitations in support of the claim. We develop evidence to support these limitations, including when appropriate, securing testing for our clients.

Often, insurance companies deny long-term disability claims, arguing that an illness is based only on subjective complaints or a lack of objective findings to support a condition. However, some conditions do not have objective evidence available. To permit an insurance company to tonight and claim on the basis would be wrong. Another tactic regularly employed by the insurance companies is to completely refuse to recognize an illness as a disability, accusing the policyholder of merely gathering a series of symptoms. Again, this is why we focus upon functionality, rather than diagnosis.

Insurance companies often also fail to consider the nature of a claimant’s multiple conditions, choosing instead to isolate the conditions and ignore the overall impact upon one’s functional limitations. We challenge them not to view these conditions in separate silos, but rather, to appreciate the comorbidity that often exists with multiple conditions. These strategies are geared by the insurance company with one thing in mind: to delay and deny making payments on a policy.

We represent policyholders with many medical conditions, including: